


A Dictionary of the Language of the Angels

by LadyFlorenceCrayeCraye



Series: Jeeves and The Better Angels of Our Nature [2]
Category: Jeeves & Wooster, Jeeves - P. G. Wodehouse, Psmith - P. G. Wodehouse
Genre: British Museum, Cruising, M/M, Original Character(s), Period-Typical Homophobia, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-23
Updated: 2016-09-01
Packaged: 2018-08-10 15:16:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7850110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyFlorenceCrayeCraye/pseuds/LadyFlorenceCrayeCraye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jeeves POV. Ever the model of composure, a gentleman's personal gentleman encounters an eccentric young man in Bloomsbury who almost succeeds in warming his sang froid. If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Etruscan Gallery

**Author's Note:**

> So I like to ruin P G Wodehouse characters by superimposing them onto social histories of early 20th century queer London. Sue me, but also clearly don't. 
> 
> I think this might be a long ride. This strange fic - a combination of Wodehouse pastiche, very gentle ribbing of some of the stylistic aspects of inter-war fiction and my own personal head cannon re. the fate and history of Rupert Psmith, who is my favourite of all Wodehouse characters - tells the events of a more traditional Bertie-centric story (also up) called 'Where Angels Rush In', from Jeeves' perspective.
> 
> You can read both together, but they also stand alone. Unlike Bertie Wooster, who falls over without Jeeves to prop him up. 
> 
> What am I doing with my life?
> 
> Love ya,
> 
> Lady F. Craye-Craye

Today the Etruscan gallery is almost empty. 

In the far corner I recognise an elderly gentleman, Mr Jenkins, with whom I have some slight acquaintance. He does not hear me enter for he is held in rapt in attention by a case of votive statuary, against the glass of which his nose is firmly pressed. 

Were my employer Mr Wooster present, I feel certain he would be able to extend a few remarks upon the nose in question and in doing so characterise it more vividly. While he is not by any means a literary man, my employer has a certain joyous and unexpected faculty with language. In his absence I will try to do some merit by it. 

The appendage is sizeable and from it sprout a prodigious bouquet of wiry grey hairs, which seem to multiply in between our meetings like mushrooms at midnight. Alongside this fecund protuberance, my acquaintance has rested on the glass a child's lined exercise book, in which he writing at furious pace. 

Aside from the scuffling sound of the old man's pencil, the gallery is silent. In respect of this I decide against making known my presence, for I can see that my acquaintance is fully occupied within his scholarship. 

Mr Jenkins is a retired points-man from South Yorkshire, who since leaving the railways has fixed the steel-trap of a considerable intellect on the question of the first human language, or as he terms it 'the language of the angels'. 

Ostensibly he had moved down to London upon retirement to help a daughter and son-in-law who run a grocer's shop in Camberwell, but in practise he had taken up an almost permanent residence in the reading room of the British Museum. Quite without formal academic affiliation, outside of lectures at the Workers' Educational Association, the old gentleman has in his declining years now made a good study of not merely Greek and Latin, but Hebrew and Sumerian.

In conversation he has confessed that the subject has been his preoccupation ever his Sunday School days. Once, at a tender age on the annual church treat to Blackpool, he witnessed a French governess pushed off the pier by her young charges; in the mellay that followed she uttered curses quite unknown to him in Barnsley. It occurred to him then that Eve could not have scolded Adam in anything at all resembling English. He had mentioned this insight to the vicar, who was able to confirm it. 

He had confided in me upon previous occasions that once he has cracked it, he will publish the first ever English to Angel dictionary, which will be sold exclusively at revivalist meetings and in railway station book shops. 

On some instinct, as I am about to enter into the next gallery, I turn and pause in the doorway. 

A young man has come striding from the preceding room, and with a clap on the shoulder has startled my acquaintance out of silence. With an exclamation, which more closely resembles an oath, the pencil slips from my friend's fingers and drops to the ground. 

“Good afternoon, Comrade Professor” says a tall, dark-haired youth with unfeigned warmth, bending like a crane and restoring to my friend his pencil, “Is the universal language still giving you the slip? It is elusive! Well, let me not keep you from the grindstone. Your should not allow anyone, even a fellow enemy of the late jerry-builders of Babel such as myself, to put you off the scent. I would consider it a safety-bet to wager odds-on you will be writing postcards to the angels by Christmas.” 

I notice my friend's shoulders stiffen. 

I linger in the doorway, listening discretely, unaware of at the time of conversational torrent which was to follow. 

“I like to think” continues the young man, unperturbed by his lack of welcome and warming to his theme, “That had I been an Israelite back in the days when it may still have made a difference, things may yet have turned out for the better. For though the precise schedule of works are long-since lost – trampled, I fear, beneath the inexorable tread of time, scoffed in its entirety by the worms and the moths of ages – some ancient clerk must have spotted the fundamental flaw in the design. 

Allow yourself Comrade Professor if you have an idle moment, to contemplate what a turn man's history may have then taken."

If Mr Jenkins is contemplating, he gives no outward sign of it. The young man smiles beneficently and commences to set the scene, for his unwitting co-conversationalist. 

"Picture" says the youth, " The desert sands. Dull birds circle overhead, but all is silent. All have downed-tools. A single Israelite has come striding purposefully from the Local Authority office on a Monday morning – or as it may perhaps have been, a Tuesday morning after a Bank Holiday Monday – and told the foreman of that Babylonian building site it is neither safe nor sanitary to build so near the seat of God. Nolle prosequi. Your mission, Comrade Professor, is obsolete. The common tongue is kept. We all speak as the angels. Even taciturn men of action like ourselves. The cry goes out, 'Babel is averted'”

Watching my friend, I am reminded of an incident one Christmas morning at my Aunt Annie's residence in Clapham, whereupon an old Jack Russell terrier, having been allowed into the kitchen on account of the bitter weather, was biffed on the nose by a bunny rabbit belonging to my cousin Jack's wife, Julia. 

Immediately informed that the rabbit is a guest of honour who must remain unmolested, the muzzled turbulence of the terrier's internal struggle was not entirely dissimilar to what I was now witnessing. 

Quite oblivious to the effect he was having, or perhaps simply accustomed to it, the young man resumes his treatise. 

“Consider all we might have been spared, comrade. I do not simply refer to an end to all war and human strife. An end to war is no mere thing, but can be managed. I refer of course to the unalterable fact that had town planning been more scrupulously practised by those desert tribesmen of the long-distant era, not a single schoolboy would have been barred from blissful dreaming by the intolerable knowledge of the existence of not merely a fourth, but of a fifth declension.” 

Mr Jenkins by now looks quite startled. The fight has gone out of him. It is evident from his expression, that to be caught in full flow of the young gentleman's conversational thrust is not completely unlike the sensation of finding oneself stood between in the narrow gap between a pair of fully-laden freight trains as they travel at speed in opposite directions. 

Seeing no other option, he dusts off the pencil and resumes his note taking. The language of the angels is seeming more distant than ever, but the young man is not finished. 

Were you aware,” says the interlocutor sternly, now looking down his monocle at his helpless interogee, “that 'though time and experience removes me from the third-form dormitory of my own callow youth, even I am beset some nights by phobia? It is the truth, my dear Professor. Messrs. Karloff and Lugosi might be the very image of a nightmare to the tenderly raised young thugs of Billingsgate and Bermondsey, but for one who has been compelled to disentangle the distinction between the dative and the ablative, it is the image of a Latin master, rising like the unquiet dead beyond the playing fields and requesting one extemporise upon a text of Horace's, which will raise the shudder by cast-iron guarantee. All this for the want of a simple measure of town planning. No. Had I been on the job, it would not have stood, Comrade Professor. It would not have stood at all.”

What response, if any, my friend made to this soliloquy I do not hear, for in that moment I felt the young man's eyes fix on me. Caught eavesdropping, the blood rushes to my ears. I am caught out.

As I go to leave, I see the old man lodge his pencil between a set of tobacco-yellowed dentures which shift meditatively as he collects the thread of his thoughts once more. Noticing me in the doorway Mr Jenkins nods in greeting, I raise my hat. 

I leave in a state of moderate perturbation. For while I must admit to being rather amused by the young man's strange monologue, my amusement is not unmingled with irritation. 

While Mr Jenkins's theories on the origins of language are quite at odds with all notions of modern scholarship on the matter, I have some fellow feeling towards the elderly autodidact. Although he is a zealot and may be considered something of a crank, he is an intelligent man. I too, was compelled through circumstance to terminate my formal education at a young age, entering my first employment shortly after my twelfth birthday. 

My political sympathies can hardly be described as Bolshevik, but there seemed to be something rather cruel that having been denied the advantage of early education, this young man – who in speech and attitude, though eccentric was undoubtedly educated – might step lightly between galleries, and make fun of Mr Jenkins and his ilk. It cut too close. 

Perhaps too, my sympathy was engaged by the familiar agony of devotion to the unsuitable object. Just as Mr Jenkins is doomed to fixate on recreating a language all conventional scholars of linguistics know was never spoken, the object of my own fixation remains unspeakable. 

But as I turn to exit, the young man lifts his hat to me in a gallant gesture and beams. Something shifts in my stomach. I recognise it as a sudden want. To deny this, as I often do, becomes like keeping an ocean behind a locked door. I feel a wave rising. 

Disapprobation mixing uncomfortably with desire, I find I follow the young gentleman into the next gallery instead. 

Early Roman Funerary sculpture in not altogether successful in keeping the young man's attention for long, and with some disappointment I see him wander back towards the east staircase 

I leave soon after, but as I pause to read the inscription on a case of Attic vases I become aware of someone performing a studied impression of reading the inscription in a case nearby. 

As I move to inspect the contents of the next case, the strange young man gracefully follows. We have not yet acknowledged each others game, although both are aware of each other's presence in the room. 

He is tall and dark. 

His suit is well-cut and immaculately pressed, modish and in West End years something close to the grandfather of my own rather conservative dark wool ensemble. He wears an elegant, blueish-grey tie, of the sort I would consider most unsuitable were my employer to bring home, signalling as it does an familiarity with a more artistic mode of living. His shoes are of a soft suede. 

I move into the next gallery, keeping half an eye on the door and with with catlike poise he follows at a distance. 

With great discipline I keep my eyes on the case in front of me. He catches my reflection looking at him in the glass. Without meeting my eye, he moves lightly on to the next case and my reflection continues to watch him as he moves across the room. A glint enters his eyes, and I know he senses a victory. 

For a few minutes we take turns between us, swapping back and forth between cat and then mouse as deftly as cricketers fielding a ball. Until I am standing at his side looking into a case quite unaware of its contents, and pressing almost imperceptibly against his shoulder. 

Only then does the young man allow a brief sphinx's smile to pass his lips, as he raises his eyes to meet mine in the polished glass, watching in unwavering reflection. Still he does not turn around. 

And even then, I make no outward expression of what is passing between us. 

It has been too long, but I am still fluent in this silent language. It is an elemental language of a type never countenanced by old Mr Jenkins, with his chewed down pencil and his exercise books from Woolworths. This language, stripped bare of words and grammar, liberated from the burden of supporting legal codes, germinates instead a wild species of poetry. 

My face remains so motionless, my expression so unreadable and severe, that I realise for a moment my young companion is wondering if – to his chagrin – he has yet misunderstood the nature of our game. The consequences of that eventuality would range from the calamitous to the merely excruciating. I press a little closer, and so he may feel reasonably assured he has judged correctly. 

I move to leave, pausing only for a second to see if the young man is following. He is. Still catlike, the young man moves lithely, as comfortable in his surroundings as a boy king. We pass Assyrian lions, a great basalt statue of a demonic-looking Egyptian god and the Rosetta stone, at which I pause briefly, wondering as I always do at how is has made the mysteries of Egypt legible, though no less strange. 

I retrieve my overcoat and umbrella from the cloakroom, stopping as I do so to exchange a few words with the attendant on duty. During our brief conversation I loose sight of the peculiar young man, and for a moment I am unable to tell for certain if I am more disappointed or relieved. 

When I step out into the early-evening sunlight however, the young man is waiting for me on the museum steps. 

It is a fine, bright day in mid-October, and though still mild for the time of year, there is a taste of bonfire in the air. 

The young man slips his hand into his inner breast pocket and takes out a slim silver cigarette case. Fixing me with an intelligent eye asks, casually, if I might happen to have a light.

From the depths of the overcoat comes a box of matches. I strike him one and the young man steadies my hand with his own, as he inclines his head to the light of the small flame. 

“Thank you, comrade …?”

“Smith.” I say, automatically and the match burns out. 

“Comrade Smith.” The young man frowns slightly, then brightens “May I offer you a cigarette?”

He hands me the case. 

“No thank you, sir.”

“Sir! Comrade Smith, you wound me. Have we not only now been engaged in the most amicable of practical demonstrations of the principles of practical socialism? Your light in exchange for my cigarette. An instant kinship forged in the absence of hierarchical relations! My good man, you mortally wound me!”

“Then I must beg your pardon,” I say, “ For it was surely not my intention to wound you, sir, least of all mortally. However, as you have not yet chosen to elucidate me as to your own name, I confess, am at a loss as to how I might otherwise best address you.”

“Well this is where I believe we may have encountered some small embarrassment at the outset,” says the young man, trailing his cigarette as he speaks, “A glitch. A worm, of the small but not altogether piffling sort, has lodged firmly in the bud. This same bud, which I have high hopes yet might blossom into the flower of our friendship. For I too, am also a Psmith. A Psmith by both birthright and by habit. You gasp, comrade! I have astonished you. And yet I can assure you it is quite true. 

Although, in my case the P is not sounded – as in psychopomp, pseudonymous or psubterfuge, I am an acknowledged descended of the Shropshire Smiths. The last of my line. Perhaps on further acquaintance you too may prove to be a Smith by birth and not merely expediency. If this is so, then I must beg forgiveness in advance of the slight I am about to deal you, Comrade-quite-possibly-Smith. But though it bruises, you will understand the dilemma I am attempting so delicately to delineate. Given that in this particular business one meets an uncommon abundance of Smiths, if you are merely a Smith for the sake of convenience or convention, might you consider adopting the label Jones, perhaps? Or Brown?”

“In that case, Mr Psmith” I say, lifting my hat “Then please allow me to make your acquaintance as Mr Reginald Brown.”

“The pleasure is entirely mine, Comrade Brown! And I must compliment you. I have always considered Brown to be a name possessed of the the rarest fortitude. It is ever suggestive of a certain elan. A natural flair. You must be congratulated. And as we seem to be lacking in any others to perform the honours, I must be the one to congratulate.”

He offers me his hand. It is neatly manicured. 

We stand for a moment in silence. Beyond the thick line of buildings the sun is spreading cracked yolk over the rooftops, a pink and orange sunset has overtaken the chimney pots. 

“I say, Comrade Brown, you wouldn't be able to direct me towards Lamb's Conduit Street? I have it on good authority it is not far from here. In the matter of providing a match, you proved more than equal to the challenge where many would have balked out of hand. You seem to operate a strictly non-balking policy. I admire that. I wonder if it could be replicated?”

I give the directions as accurately and concisely as a policeman. 

“Splendidly done, comrade, but I'm afraid it's simply no good. You see, this fog makes the entire enterprise quite impossible.”

“The fog, Mr Psmith?” I say, observing the uncommonly fine and clear evening. 

“Yes, a terrible London fog. A fog of the pea-soup variety, served up by the ladle full has overtaken us. The type of fog that causes the cut-throat to clap with glee and gladdens the heart of the murderer - who, after a long and balmy season, in which the air of London has been a sweet and pure as Alpine spa, had feared he might have to turn over the tools of his trade and complete a correspondence course in clerking. It's simply no use, comrade. I am afraid you will have to guide me there in person.”

“You have stated the case quite plainly, Mr Psmith. I see the merit in what you say.”

“Well then, lead on! Take my arm, if you think it's advisable, old chap. Terrible things have been known to happen in a fog.”

Politely, I decline the offered arm and so we walk a little apart, side by side in silence around the back of the museum and across the fine autumnal square. We pass the gloomy bulk of the Foundling Hospital, which looms above its walls, strangely quiet despite its multitude of young inmates concealed within, until we come to a stop at the address in question. 

“Well now we're that here, comrade,” says the young man, fixing me with a grin, “It has suddenly occurred to me that my own apartments happen to be on this very street! Surprising how place can act as a mnemonic.”

“Quite remarkable, sir. I am reminded of the system of Quintillian, who of says of Simonides...”

“You nail it perfectly, my good man! But since by fortunate coincidence we happen to be standing directly below my own rather cosy abode, and we are presently entirely unenlightened as where you might reside, Mr Brown, and as this inconvenient fog shows no signs of letting up, may I suggest we go inside?”

“I believe that might be congenial to me, Mr Psmith.”

“Then up we shall go!”

The apartment, while not so spacious or conveniently situated as the one belonging to my employer, is rather elegantly furnished, if tending to Bohemianism in its decorative flourishes. 

I remove my bowler and my host takes my overcoat, placing it on the back of a low chair. I resist the temptation to seek out a place to hang it less precariously. 

He vanishes into what I assume to be a kitchen and emerges minutes later with two drinks in hand. He catches me as I am scrutinising his bookshelves. As he hands me mine, I can see he has mixed his own rather stronger. 

“Little of interest to be found there, Comrade Brown. The library was broken up on the death of my father. What remains is of mostly sentimental value.”

Sensing something not to be touched upon, I move away towards the centre of the room. 

The young man sets himself down and moments later is quite unselfconsciously sprawled across an antique chaise, upholstered in an oriental fabric. For a moment, I have an inescapable image of a flamingo resting itself on a park bench. 

I turn away, to disguise the smallest of smiles. 

There is a photograph on an incidental table beside him of a cricketer, taken midswing as he is batting. The man's face is obscured by the angle of the photographer, but grace and determination a visible in every line of his body. It is a fine composition, and exists in a satisfying continuum with the idealised forms of marble youths that we have just taken leave of. 

“A former hobby of mine.”

“Cricket or photography, Mr Psmith?” 

“Cricket was merely thrust upon me.”

We sit in silence for a moment, while my host finishes his drink. Instinctively I move towards him, reaching out as if to take his glass and to fetch another – it is difficult to forget one's early training. 

Remembering myself I pause, standing over where he is still stretched out on the couch.

He is watching me, his dark eyes not meeting mine in an echo of our earlier flirtation. A slight flush is spreading from his collarbone upwards. At some point in our conversation, he has removed his collar and loosened the pale blue tie. My eye is drawn to the whiteness of his neck. 

I become aware from my host's sudden reticence, that my experience in these matters is perhaps rather greater than his own.

His self-assurance has lapsed momentarily, the habitual and well-practised sang froid of my new companion has run up, if temporarily, against its limits. While I do not plan to prolong his sudden loss of ease to the point of discomfort, I find myself enjoying this state of affairs. 

Perhaps it is merely a matter of so many years having elapsed since I was similarly tentative in these sorts of seductions – if indeed I ever was – but I admit that this lapse of composure, this shift in the dynamic between the two, awakens within me a powerful species of eros. 

It is like being clothed, while in the presence of another's nakedness. 

I feel as if my shoulders broaden, as if I grow taller, stronger and more capable. I know that in the next moment I will take hold of the reigns of the situation, and be thanked for having done so. It makes me feel a sort of benevolence; to want to be kinder. I pause, and the air in the room thickens. He moves a fraction of a inch towards me. 

With my hands firmly on his shoulders, I bend to kiss him. 

For a moment his mouth parts and his head tilts back, like a starlet in the final frame a moving picture, but then with a smile and sudden surge of masculine grace he grabs me towards him, and we are pressed close against each other, my weight bearing down against him. 

The glass in his hand drops to the floor, with a soft thud against the Turkish carpet. 

“Comrade Brown, I have been remiss in my responsibilities as host.”

“How so, sir?”

“I have been guilty of hypocrisy. For many years, I have welcomed with some enthusiasm the growing liberalisation in matters of correct dress for gentleman, particularly within these cheerful little domestic gatherings. In light of this, I ought to have invited you to remove your trousers.” 

“If I might speak frankly, sir, on any other occasion I might have questioned if you were perhaps not – rather in the manner of Galileo Galilei – a man who had outpaced his own time. But under the present circumstances...”

“Under the present circumstances...?”

“Under the present circumstances, I see there may be some merit in the policy proposed.” 

“Then we progress, Comrade Brown, we progress!”


	2. Bloomsbury

Sometime later, my erstwhile companion lay in the large unmade bed and smoked a cigarette through a long holder, while I washed in the basin the corner of the room. 

“You are quite certain you won't stay, comrade?” 

“I apologise, but it would be quite impossible”

“You must return to East Finchley by omnibus?”

“East Finchley?”

“New Malden by the 10.05 from Waterloo?”

“Neither, sir. But I regret, I cannot stay.”

I dressed and a sort of melancholy seemed to settle on me.

The bedroom was furnished more sparsely than the living room. The basin was of the chipped enamel type, common to all cheaply rented rooms. While it had clearly come furnished with the apartment, the bedstead was of beautiful oak, unfashionable, antique and out of proportion to its surroundings. It had been brought in from somewhere else, where it must have belonged better. The two together depressed me. 

It was dark now and I only hoped that my employer had not reconsidered his decision to dine out this evening. For although he had given me the afternoon off and was always most liberal in his dealings towards me, I did not like the thought of him returning to find the flat abandoned. 

My new friend was also uncharacteristically taciturn. Apart from a faint reddening of the skin where, in the moment of my crisis I had pressed my mouth hard against his shoulder blade to keep from crying out, his pale skin was quite unmarked by evidence of our love-making. 

Seeing him now he was perhaps a few years older than I had first supposed; closer to my own age than that of my young master, which would put him in the later part of his twenties.

He had slim hips, which made him seem still boyish. His body was almost hairless, and his lashes were curiously long and dark. 

Despite the recentness of our acquaintance, I was filled with a sudden tenderness towards him. As if sensing this, he rose in a fluid motion from the bed and kissed me on the side of the mouth. 

He bent to retrieve a paisley silk dressing gown where is lay on the bare floorboards. Thus attired he accompanied me back into the gaily decorated living room. 

I felt better at ease here. There was something strangely sad about that bedroom, which I didn't like to think about. 

“Will you take my card?” he asked, taking one from the drawer of the bureau upon which I had left my drink untasted earlier in the evening, “I'm not on the 'phone here, but you can always leave a message for me at my club, if you prefer not to write. Drones Club, not Senior Conservative if you wouldn't mind... although I come increasingly to believe that you're the sort who is discrete enough to entrust with the keeping State secrets, if I happened to have any lying about the place in need of entrusting. I'll make a note of the number for you on the back.”

“Thank you, Mr Psmith.”

“You'll take it then? Capital.”

I retrieve my hat and overcoat from the back of the chair. My host helps me into my coat, and I am moved by the small intimacy of the gesture. For a moment my resolve weakens and I want nothing more than to pull him back into my arms, to sleep and wake up beside somebody else for the first time in what would have been so many years. 

I resist however, and walk out into the narrow shared hallway. Attired as he is, my host of course does not accompany me to the door. But once I am in the street, I see his slim figure black against the lighted window, although if he has turned to watch me leave, I cannot tell. 

I walk for a mile or so to clear my head. The street lamps are all lit and as I move towards Oxford Street, the shop windows are brilliant with coloured lights. In the crowd I feel marked. I take a quieter route back towards the May Fair and consider signalling a cab, but find the cool air is already soothing the heat within me, which – despite today's adventure – I have worked so diligently to extinguish since returning to the city. 

In recent years when called upon by those just starting out in my profession, to provide what small wisdom I have have accrued through long experience I have offered a simple motto: 'resource and tact'. 

It is my belief, that though these dual virtues may be cultivated separately by most smart young lads, a certain native intelligence is required if one is to master both simultaneously; a natural propensity, if I may put it that way, which may be trained through diligent application, but enlightened only through experience. 

I have often wondered if a correlation exists between those who share this propensity to manage both and the type of men who I have sought out for company on occasions.

Not the flashy queans who parade Piccadilly Circus, or those rouged and painted boys standing to one side of the bar at the Criterion in the later hours of the evening, laughing loudly and making long, sideways looks at whoever happens to have walked through the door. But the men I have met as I walk towards Hyde Park, or along the Waterloo Road, who hold your gaze a moment too long and offer a cigarette in the lengthening dusk. 

These men belong to neither world, not the stagy milieu of the Cafe Royal or the seediness of the Caravan nightclub and its imitators, but neither to the ordered world of my early upbringing. 

They are far removed from the tranquillity of suburban villas, those neat quiet streets of Dulwich and Nunhead; terraced houses with well-scrubbed front steps and parlours tropical with aspidistra, presided over by honourable young matrons, who having put their children to bed, listen for the husband's key in the door. 

These men comprise a queer sort of brotherhood, a tribe without homeland; visible only to each other. 

I first became aware of this sort of man when I was myself in uniform, staying in a servicemen's hostel in Waterloo while on leave in the last months of the War. Until then I had naively believed that most assignations were as unpredictable as weather, that one simply waited until a pass was made and reciprocated if one felt inclined. 

The establishment in which I had taken a bed for the night has now become somewhat notorious. I had been unaware of any reputation it may have borne at the time, having chosen it principally for the relative privacy afforded by its having sleeping cubicles in place of open dormitories. It was also furnished with a small library, through my leave did not extend long enough to make much use of this facility. 

It was early in spring, although the day could hardly be considered dew-pearled and the lark was most conspicuously absent. But as I stood at a coffee stall outside the hostel, I became aware of a man of about thirty years of age, watching me from behind a newspaper.

He was soberly dressed, clean shaven with neatly clipped hair, rather mousy but fair and somehow quite appealing. He had kind eyes. I am still not sure what compelled me, but I approached him and asked him for the time (although my watch was in my pocket and my heart was in my throat). We talked a brief while and he suggested we might walk on together.

I followed him between the arches at the back of the station and as trains passed overhead, he pressed me into the rough brick of an alleyway and I knew irrevocably that something in my world had shifted.   
What exactly passed between us in the dark of that railway arch, I will not detail here. Educated readers may guess, but I returned to my lodgings buoyant and alive with a secret knowledge. 

I had known from my own early adolescence that it was possible to go with the sort of individual one might commonly describe as 'pansies'. Far easier in fact, than going with the respectable young girls of my own background and safer – or so people said – than going with prostitutes, who engendered within me even at that young age the fastidious horror of contagion. 

My aunt was proprietress of a public house in Deptford. After my parents' premature deaths, when I was compelled to leave school and take up my first employment as a page in a girls' school, I would stay with her during the summers and assist in its management. 

It was an eminently respectable establishment, although my father had not thought so when he was alive and indeed had always spoken rather disparagingly of his sister-in-law and my mother's family more generally. It was there I first made the acquaintance of Doll Evans, who worked on his parents' fruit and vegetable stall. 

Doll was universally popular among both customers and traders at the market. 

I imagine this would all sound quite alien to a gentleman like my employer, and to others of his circle. They are generally speaking pleasant, but rather unimaginative young fellows, who from a young age have been instilled with the mores and vales of their own class. They have been moulded by famous British public school system, which by design is unforgiving of effeminacy.

Among working people, however, you tend to find that within certain limitations, there is a greater toleration of this sort of thing and Doll was generally well thought of. 

This was due in part, to the fact that 'she' was always quick with a joke or a sly retort. Doll was always an incorrigible source of gossip, but fundamentally warm-hearted and strangely gentle; a day-dreamer, despite his sharp and ready wit. 

As a register of births, deaths and marriages Doll could rival The Times. 

A glamorous creature; Doll waved his hair, or so he once told me, by sleeping at night it up in the twists of paper that came in orange crates; 'just like that dear old tart Nell Gwynn, before me'. 

His eyes were lined in kohl, his cheeks rouged and powdered and his wrists clattered with bangles. 

While Doll and I never exchanged physical intimacies, I became something of a confidente and through him I had my first exposure to what it might mean to be 'queer'. 

Doll was never short of boyfriends. While men might say vulgar things about nancies and pansies in passing, many of them would not think twice about keeping company with Doll in between girlfriends.

To them, he was more like a woman than a man, not to be pitied or despised – for after all, we all liked him and wished him well – but quite another category of being and so fair game. 

I knew too, from eavesdropping from behind the bar, that if one were hard up it was possible to go up West to the pubs or music halls there and let older, wealthy 'poofs' pick you up, in exchange for drinks or for money. 

These were normal men who engaged in it, not queers, as I – with delicious and agonising shame – was beginning to understand myself to be. Dock-workers with huge, calloused hands, a heavy tread and foul language, who viewed me with the suspicion – or so I believed at the time, whether rightfully or not – that that in my neatness and reserve and because I worked in service during the year, I harboured a latent effeminacy. 

To them there was no ignominy in taking part in a bit of trade; in truth it was a sort of boasting. A confirmation in a strange way, of their own normality – since it went without saying that they would only ever take the masculine role. 

And though as I lay sleepless in the room I shared with my cousins above the pub, I often thought about their stories, I never engaged with that sort of rough trade myself, neither at the time nor later. 

I was too young to enlist when war broke out, and with so many other young men gone I was able to leave my post at the girls' school for a job my uncle had secured for me as footman in one of the principal houses of England. 

As others left for the Front, I was promoted rapidly to head footman and studied my present occupation under the tutelage of the butler there, until I turned eighteen in 1916 and was conscripted. By 1917, I was serving overseas. 

In those eighteen months, I rapidly came to know that in between the ever-mingled fear and boredom that characterised life in the trenches, strange sympathies could spring up in the depths of a long watch, which could be as fleeting as gas flares in the dark or burn on for weeks and months.

This should surprise none but the most delicately nurtured, for death was so close and women so far away, that peace and war were separate countries. It was seldom sex, for the privations of trench life seemed to retard the normal drives, but often a desperate seeking for comfort. 

Yet neither Doll nor the army, could have prepared me for the discovery on my return home that just beneath the ordinary fabric city life an invisible network of men like me existed. In that spring twilight among the railway arches I was inducted. For though I never thought to ask his name, that sandy-haired man had stamped me a passport to this land of my own peculiar birthright. 

That day marked the beginning for me. The knowledge that through actions and signals almost subliminal I might enter into a second world. A world within which I was not the invert or the queer, but an explorer, navigator and heir to a secret, shared kingdom. That in walking the streets of the city, one might meet, make love, make friends or form alliances, and that these might last for a night, or the duration of the sexual act, or endure for a lifetime. 

When the war ended, rather than returning to my previous occupation as a domestic servant I spent a few months apprenticed with a cousin of mine in the jewel trade with premises in Hatton Gardens.   
I did not lodge with my cousin and his wife, but took a furnished room in Farringdon with the obliging sort of landlady who made a virtue out of noticing nothing short of blue murder, so long as the rent was paid on time. For a giddy six months of so, I was at liberty to explore this hidden kingdom more fully.

I was still little more than a foolish boy when I returned to London, reckless and open-hearted. I had no great affairs, though many assignations through which I came to understand the hidden geographies desire, which mapped the city's night time parks and thoroughfares, like the veins and arteries of a human heart. 

I cannot express the strange exhilaration of those first months in the city after the War. 

A decade on, I am incredulous I could ever have been so terribly young. Scarcely twenty years of age, healthy and strong, with the ineluctable knowledge that unlike so many of my comrades – quite by chance and through no merit of my own – I had slipped from the jaws of death, scarcely damaged.   
Unlike some I felt no guilt then, not for living nor for my mode of living. It seemed natural that I should be young and alive and seeking confirmation of all this in the warmth of the arms of others. 

Tragically enough, of course, like too many a young Icarus it was only a matter of time before I would discover the price of soaring onwards with wings of wax. In circumstances to painful to detail at length here, I found out the perils which come attendant with citizenship of this strange, furtive double world into which I had so eagerly and so blindly crossed.

In light of what followed, chastened and wiser, I resumed employment as a footman in a rather staid country establishment where the temptations of the metropolis seemed distant as a dream. I moved between positions with a number of employers, advancing rapidly through the hierarchy of life below stairs, and it was not until several years later I returned to the city and found my current employment. 

During the first phase of that period of rustication, I lived in almost perfect celibacy. Even in years of my middle-twenties, I could not find the same joy within the sexual act. I carried on a few small love affairs, but my pleasure had been poisoned by the knowledge of the potential cost at which it was purchased. It seemed all happiness came only on credit. 

Since entering the employ of my current master, I had avoided almost any assignation which may bring scandal to our little household, allowing myself – until this afternoon – only the most fleeting of contacts, engaged in with the strictest anonymity. It had been a strangely attenuated mode of living, but I had believed myself to be content. 

I turn my key in the door and walk up to Mr Wooster's apartment. No light is on and his coat is not in the hall, so it is evident that he has kept to his intention to dine out. 

I sweep through the apartment as if I am on rails, creating order from chaos. I neaten the loose sheet music on the top of the piano and return a gramophone record to its sleeve. I run a soft cloth over every surface, in case any dust has fallen in my absence. I remove all evidence of time having passed since I left, as if I can erase the last five hours since leaving for Bloomsbury and with it the memory of the young man's body beneath mine, the agony of feeling my heart jolt back into life. 

There is nothing left with which to busy myself. I have pressed Mr Wooster's suits, his shirts lie in white rows in his dresser drawers. His bed is turned down, with stiff clean sheets exposed. I stand in the door of his bedroom and breathe in the pleasant smell of cedar wood, furniture polish and cologne. 

He too, in all the time I have known him, has always slept alone. 

I return to my own smaller room and sit at my desk, where I compose a short note to Doll asking is he would like to meet at Lyons next Wednesday afternoon (we have kept in touch all these years). I feel so reckless suddenly. I want more than anything to set it all out of paper. No, much more than that I want to shout it out loud. To tell someone, anyone, about the strange young man who so nearly made me smile.

I imagine how it would be to tell Mr Wooster. 

I imagine he comes home from the club, and calls for me to fetch him a nightcap. 

He asks me how I spent my afternoon and I tell him that I went to British Museum, sir, and that while I had not gone there thinking I might go looking for trade, I had in any case picked up a young man of Mr Wooster's own class – a well-bred gentleman, though seemingly down on his luck, a member Mr Wooster's own club – , and he taken me home and I had fucked him. 

Even thinking of how it would be to say out loud, floods me with a terrible shame. 

Would he understand what I meant, or would it be as a foreign language to him? (Does he perhaps dream blameless dreams, speaking while he sleeps only in Mr Jenkins lost universal language of the angels?) 

Would his eyes widen as my meaning became apparent, would he raise his voice in disapprobation or would he – and this is more likely – blush like an overgrown schoolboy and be made speechless by the revelation? 

Would he be disgusted? Curious? Would he – and now my own stomach somersaults to think about it – would he feel jealous? 

This line of thinking is dangerous and I know I must suppress it. I go into the bathroom and draw for myself a tub full of water. I bathe quickly and mechanically, my body distorted beneath the layer of soap scum. I dress in a clean nightshirt and dry the sides bathtub. 

I clean my teeth and nails. I lay out my clothes for the morning and take a book with me to my bed. But the words are only ink and swim in front of my eyes. I close them and count in squares until I fall asleep. 

I do not dream.


	3. Mayfair

I wake before dawn.

As a boy I struggled to rouse myself from bed. My mother was tolerant of this, while my father was not.

Upon entering service I soon became acclimatised to early mornings, although there were days when my body ached for sleep. Now they are habitual. I wake and sleep is forgotten.

Even when I am at leisure, I cannot unlearn this habit of early rising. When I was employed as a butler it was necessary to rise at dawn to superintend the work of the household. As a valet, particularly in the establishment of my present master, whose refusal to share living space with the lark is legendary, my mornings are rather more relaxed affairs.

I rise and I dress carefully, completing my _toilette_ with the fastidiousness I have practised ever since boyhood.

My face in the small square looking glass is blank, even to me.

The memory of yesterday evening surges to the forefront of my consciousness with a terrible rush. I wonder if Mr Psmith is still sleeping in that oversized bed. I wonder if he dressed after I left, or if he is still bare-limbed and pale beneath those tangled sheets.

I want to run to him. I am so foolish, infatuated.

Mr Wooster has returned home some time in the early hours. He has left a trail of hat, coat, scarf, shoes, tie, collar and cuff-links from the door of the apartment, to the door of his bedroom. From this I infer that the night has been a heavy one and upon waking he may require something rather more than the customary toast and tea...

I collect each garment, like a beachcomber gathering up what has washed ashore. He will not wake for a several hours more. The door to his bedchamber is slightly ajar, I pause and listen to the gentle sound of his breathing.

I separate the things to be laundered from the things to be put away.

I enter the kitchen and set about making my own morning tea. Unlike the gloomy, ancestral halls where I first learnt my trade, the flat has been fitted all modern conveniences. This means we are fitted for both gas and electric, so there are no fires to be made up. I set the kettle on the gas ring and wait for the water to boil.

My Aunt Annie can tell fortunes with tea leaves. She only tells them out of spite.

I wonder what she would see in my cup.

Stop being foolish, Reginald!

Somehow the events of the last twenty-four hours have reduced me to a simpering schoolgirl.

I am not in love with Mr Psmith, but he has awakened in me something which feels as dangerous as if it were. I wonder whether it is wise to see him again. I had no intention of it as I left yesterday, but the temptation to renew our acquaintance grows with each passing minute.

I greet the milkman and he informs me of the relative fortunes of West Ham United football club, as he does every morning after a league match has been played. How did he come by the impression that I was a fellow supporter? I am all things to all men.

I bring the milk inside and drink my tea. I do not breakfast.

Although the flat is immaculate, I sweep and dust. I relish the stillness and the calm of the elegant interior.

I take a bundle of Mr Wooster's shirts and small garments to be laundered. On the way home I stop to purchase bread and eggs for his breakfast. The bacon and butter are already in the Frigidaire. I do not like the baker's boy, who I find impudent _in extremis_ and so prefer not to have our bread delivered. As long as bread appears at regular intervals, Mr Wooster gives no more thought to the practicalities of its provenance than an unobservant disciple might have to given to pondering the origins of the profusion of loaves dispensed at the feeding of the five thousand.

_En route_ I post my note to Doll asking if he would like to meet next Wednesday. I still have Mr Psmith's card in my pocket and as I walk I turn it over between my fingers, like a piece of lucky heather. 

It is not yet 9.00am when I return to our apartment. I attend to various small tasks, but my mind is elsewhere. With no further errands to run and Mr Wooster still sleeping, I sit in the kitchen and consult first  _The Times,_ then  _The Express_ and finally  _The Sporting Times_ . Fully abreast of current affairs, I put the papers to one side and read a chapter of Freud. 

The telephone rings and I take down a rather cryptic message from Mrs Travers, the favourite aunt of my employer.

“Hallo hallo hallo!”

“Mr Wooster's residence.”

“Oh hallo Jeeves! If that is you.”

“It is indeed, Mrs Travers madame.”

“I thought as much. No use hiding it.”

“I wouldn't presume to attempt so, madame.”

“Quite so. No good in asking if my sweet and tender pestilence of a nephew is _compos mentis_ yet, I shouldn't suppose what?”

“Mr Wooster is still resting madame.”

“Although as _mentis_ goes _compos_ has never been his strong suit. Well alright, Jeeves, so long as he's lolling about in idle slumber I shalln't trouble you to fetch him for me. You can tell him from me, Jeeves, that the dear young blight on the crops will be giving me lunch today at Harridges.”

“At what hour should I tell him, madame?”

“As soon as he stirs up the natural gumption to get out of bed, of course! Although it may be the more judicious course just to catch him sleep-walking... But you're to inform him I will be expecting him in the Harridges tea room at 13.00pm. Oh and tell him to arrive incognito. Thanks, Jeeves, I know you're equal to the task!”

The call thus terminated, I return to the kitchen.

Across the hallway I can hear the sounds of my young employer stirring beneath his sheets. I take this as the cue to boil up the water for his tea and to concoct my special preparation, which he has often found felicitous on this sort of post-late-night morning

I arrange the tea service and the cure-all on a tray, which I balance on the hall table. I tiptoe to the door of the bedroom and push it open just a fraction further. My master is sprawled on top of the bedclothes, and I can tell he is on the point of waking, for he burrows further into the pillows as if trying to force his way back into a dream.

I retrieve the tray and hover at the doorway.

A minute or two later, the figure on the bed turns onto his front and I slip into the bedchamber.

I open the blinds just an inch or so to allow a little light to spill forth into the room. It catches in the dark-blond hairs of his bare legs below the nightshirt, which has ridden up to his thighs. My eyes glance over the bulge between the legs, the lovely torso and the high cheek bones. The light shows up the short hairs that curl closely to the nape of his neck. He is altogether covered in a honey-textured light. His face is turned away from me in feigned sleep, his eyes still closed. I know as is with second sight, he is aware of me moving through the room, listening to my footsteps.

I hold my breath.

I place the tray on the table beside the bed. He opens his eyes and smiles. My heart constricts. That sleepy, grateful smile in the dim room, his eyes looking up at me from the bed, with the warmth of humour...

Before I can even think the thought, I push it down far below the realm consciousness.

Mr Freud may have his opinions on the matter, but the Stoics understood that the only thing a man may truly be master of in this world are his own thoughts:

_If a cucumber is bitter. Throw it away. There are briars in the road. Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, "And why were such things made in the world?"_

I hand him the restorative.

He gulps it, grimaces and thrusts back to me the empty glass.

“Bitter, eh what Jeeves!”

I set it back on the tray and pour his tea. He props himself up more fully against his pillows and watches as I complete the familiar ritual.

While he drinks the tea, I move silently around the room attending to the small disorder of the night before – the spats and trousers on the floor, the chair knocked a little out of place, the jacket discarded.

“Mrs Travers rang for you earlier, sir” I say, adjusting the blinds to allow a little more sunlight to enter, now my employer had acclimatised.

Having relayed the message, I leave to prepare toast for Mr Wooster, who has declined anything heavier for the present moment.

In the kitchen I feel myself relax. I breathe in deeply.

When I re-enter the bedroom, he is sitting up in bed drinking his second cup of tea. I run his bath, while he takes some breakfast.

Once he has finished, I remove the tray and when I return he is sitting in the bathtub with the door ajar.

I make up the bed and commence laying out a suitable outfit for the afternoon.

“I say, Jeeves,” says Mr Wooster from his bath, “Did anything in the demeanour of my honoured aunt this morning, tip you off to whether this little lunch engagement of ours might be no more than a pretext? I mean to say, will I simply be expected to chew of the fat and swig of the ale in good company, or am I to be plunged once more into criminal conspiracy? Harridges isn't her usual watering hole.”

Though early on in our relationship I had described my young master as mentally negligible, he can display certain flashes of astuteness.

I relay to him the message about the importance of arriving incognito, though I leave out the bit about preferentiality of his attending in a state of somnambulism.

He asks if this means he should attend the luncheon in fancy dress and I reply in the negative, that I should find this most inadvisable.   
  
“And you should not be wrong, Jeeves!” he retorts

“If I might make a suggestion, sir” I say, handing him a towelling-cloth robe as he steps from the bathtub, “I have laid out the tweed with the light-blue stripe.”

He shakes the water from his hair like a cheerful dog. It is getting rather long. The steam has risen to cover the mirror. I do not look at him as he walks from the bathroom into the bedroom. I do not think about Mr Psmith yesterday bending to pick up the dressing gown at the foot of the bed, I do not think about him on the bed, I do not think of Mr Wooster on the bed, I do not think about either of them. I fill my mind with nothing. I am talking as I accompany him from the bathroom, back into the bedroom.

“Contrary to most popular wisdom on the subject,” I am saying, “Camouflage is not merely a matter of obtaining a disguise. After all, one cannot convince the eye not to see by force of will, for the nature of the eye is seeing. Camouflage is a matter of misleading the eye into seeing without taking note of what it sees. If you dress to your surroundings and proceed about your business, lightly, yes sir, but with confidence and resolution, then you will give off no suggestion of subterfuge and it is most unlikely you will draw any unwanted attention.”

I finish talking and see Mr Wooster is stood gawping at me.

I have run on too long, I have been too revealing. He is not so mentally negligible to miss entirely the doubleness in what I am saying, even if he has not quite grasped it in its entirety.

The criminal desires to be caught; I too am subject to desire.

For a moment I say nothing. To steady myself, I start counting silently in prime numbers. I keep my face inscrutable and I hope.

But I need not have worried. Mr Wooster has taken all that I have said in the spirit of innocence, for in the cold light of reason I have said virtually nothing and has read nothing additional into my words. Briefly I feel something almost like disappointment, but it is quickly flooded out by relief.

For the moment, I even think that he has seen the wisdom of the plan I have proposed:

That he will attend his aunt's rendezvous soberly and properly attired. That if he must involve himself in whatever minor conspiracy she has planned for him this time – for I have been in his employment long enough to know that this is the only possible outcome for the meeting – that he will do so boldly, without panic or dismay. That he will get the whole thing over and done with quickly and with minimal opportunity for embarrassment. That he will keep a clear head. That he will exercise his birthright as a gentleman; the right not to have to bow his head, the right to make no apology for his wishes, the right to exercise his will in the world, the right never to seek forgiveness, the right not to blush.

For when it comes to the psychology of the individual, Mr Wooster is best understood in terms of his almost pathological fear of embarrassment.

His squeamishness in these matters is so extreme that in avoidance of embarrassment he inevitably commits far graver _faux pas_.

It is this fear that has resulted, on now numerous occasions, in my employer almost contracting matrimony with a number of young women he has found most personally objectionable and who are objectively quite unsuitable.

One of his most frequent fiancées is finally due to be wed at the end of the month and fortunately it is not to my young master.

Miss Madeleine Bassett will marry the Earl of Sidcup, the prominent British fascist. The successful conclusion of whose romance, I anticipate, will vastly reduce my responsibilities towards arranging my young master's personal affairs.

My belief, however, that Mr Wooster is in concordance with myself in the manner of what constitutes 'going incognito' proves to be premature.

Having laid out for him a pleasant light tweed, with a tasteful blue stripe, he remembers an outfit sent to him by a former school friend who works in a diplomatic capacity for the imperial service. It had been a Christmas gift the previous December, and was surely intended as a curiosity, not as day wear.

It is a traditional Ottoman costume.

I lay it out for him.

I have put my point as clearly as I could, he has not heard it. My mind is on other things. I am losing my touch.

While Mr Wooster is at luncheon with his aunt, I pick up the telephone. I cradle the receiver, listening to the blankness at the end of the line, like a boy with his ear to a seashell. Then I exhale. I dial the number for the Drone's Club.

The operator connects me and my heart beats rapidly in my chest as I wait to be put through.

There are so many dangers attendant on what I am about to embark upon. A young man, with an expensive suit in a cheap apartment can only mean trouble.

In my mind I replay our conversations like a gramophone record. Did he not himself tell me that photography had been a hobby of his? I see every possible scandal. I am more afraid of blackmail, than of heartbreak.

I imagine a series grainy photographs, shot through a key hole; my life savings for a set of negatives, my liberty and my good name. A calamity, not uncommon.

I remember suddenly how is was to be twenty years of age; that night in the police cell – more wretched even than nights in Thiepval – and the agony of appearing in front of a magistrate, where in a neutral tone the constable read out the crime of which I stood accused. Caught importuning in a public lavatory. A smirk on the face of the clerk transcribing. Sordid.

Never again. I would cut out my heart rather than endure it. Indeed, I have cut out my heart and replaced it with a ticking clock.

I am put through to the club reception.

“Is it possible to leave a message for Mr R. Smith?” I ask, reading the initial from the card.

The voice on the end of the line, tells me to wait a moment while he checks the register.

“Yes, sir,” says the voice, “Who shall I say is calling?”

“Tell him Mr Brown is trying to get hold of him. If he is amenable, we can meet tomorrow at 20.00 at the usual place.”

I terminate the call. I have a day of waiting ahead of me. I count the minutes of the hours.

~*~

He rests his head upon my thigh. I am sitting up in his bed, he is lying curled up like a dog in my lap.

“So it's like this, comrade” says Psmith, “If I am wrong; you tell me I am talking out of my hat, if I am correct – as I have every reason to expect I will be, for the method cannot fail – then you simply remain silent and say nothing at all... for I have noticed you make specialism of it already, my dear fellow.

You were a promising young classicist … no, no, I err already for the physique is quite wrong. You were a promising young archaeologist … it is the brawn, my good man, that has tipped me off on that account. Just the sort of thing one might need to go about displacing bones and urns and dismantling burial mounds etcetera. You were a promising young archaeologist; the finest of your generation. At Oxford of course... or else I should have heard of you. You dug with the best of them.

Only you were caught up in a scandal. Don't flinch, so! No, no. I don't mean a scandal of that sort. After all, the evidence you go in for that sort of thing is quite circumstantial...”

He nips lightly at the soft flesh of my inner thigh. I squirm. He smiles.

“Although... a smart fellow could make a case for it...

Anyway. It started with undergraduates. In your defence of course, they were the sort of undergraduates that would trespass upon the patience of a more than usually patient sort of saint. There you were, dead set on writing up learned works on amphorae or apses or some such, and there they were engaged in riotous frolic across the quad.

One day, in a state of desperation you stood at the open window and flicked a piece of chalk. It pinged one on the forehead.

You found it satisfying. The following day you repeated the feat. It was satisfying again.

Some short while later you were flicking and pinging at the mildest provocation. You had developed a taste for it. The satisfaction multiplied. It proved addicting. Time passed, the habit became entrenched. One day the provost walked past your window, whistling a song you happened to detest and you were gripped by a sudden mania.

Like a man possessed, you flicked a stick of chalk at the estimable gentleman. It caught him dead between the eyes. He lived, but has not yet recovered. He is nursed by a maiden sister in Devon, while you were driven from the college in ignominy.

They hushed the whole thing up of course, but you were forced to take a position at a crammer in West Byfleet.

You are a school master, Comrade Brown, though rather a cut above the common or garden school master. Do not deny it, for I have seen chalk dust on your lapel. It is quite incontrovertible.”

“I'm afraid, that you are wrong on both accounts,” I say, somewhat frostily “I am not a school master and I most certainly do not have dust on my lapel, chalk or otherwise.”

“Well the Sherlock Holmes act is harder than it looks, comrade. I should like to see you try it”

“I would not presume to.”

“Alright then,” says Psmith equitably, uncoiling himself. He stretches out in a leonine manner, drapes an arm across my chest and beds down against my shoulder, “I'll confess all regardless. How you do menace me comrade, you really are the butch type. If only my mother had been around to warn me about men like you, I might have turned out for the good.”

“I rather like you as you are, s...”

“Don't call me 'sir', comrade. It unnerves me.”

“...Smith.”  
  
“And remember the 'P' is silent.”

  
“I had not forgotten.”

“I suppose you could call me Rupert, but I should rather hope you won't.”

Mr Wooster is dining with Mr and Mrs Little. I had known about the engagement in advance, or else I should not have been able to arrange this meeting of my own.

I have foregone the usual Junior Ganymede bridge tournament and met Mr Psmith outside the locked gates of the museum forecourt. All day I have performed my duties like an automaton, all day I have worried he would not come and I would be left waiting in the dark, with nothing to do but to return alone to the empty apartment or go looking for something similar.

But it is a specific desire, desire for the individual and not just the act. I like him. I like listening to him talk, which is just as well because he talks as if he is being paid by the word.

I do not want to leave, but of course it would be quite impossible to stay.

As if sensing my intention remove myself, Psmith adds a strong leg to the lazily draped arm and I am pleasantly trapped beneath him. For the moment I give in to the niceness of it all.

The weather is still mild for October, but this night has a slight edge of winter creeping in. Soon the year will turn.

“You know, comrade” he says, shifting his weight into a more comfortable position against me, “I myself was sent down from school in a minor homosexual scandal, so really it's nothing to reprove a person for. Years ago of course, when I was at Eton. I got caught out in the boat shed with one of the boys in the Sixth Form.

It was the physics master who found us, he'd been sulking about the grounds for some reason or other, when by his testimony he heard a sound. He was the assiduous sort, new to the school. A different type of man would have simply doubted the evidence of his senses and left it at that.

Anyway, it was all rather delicate.

We were dragged into the headmaster's study and even under the arbitrary system of martial law by which good boys' public schools are run, there had to be some sort of due process.Which is to say the auditorily acute young physics master was then bound to explain to the headmaster what exactly it was he'd found us doing. Well.... not exactly what is was we were doing, but at least he needed to express it approximately well enough that he could drive home the seriousness of the transgression. One can't sentence a boy to be sent down from school by apoplexy alone.

Now at the time, as it happens, I rather thought I might have invented the act in which my friend and I were engaged when we were caught _in flagrante_ so to speak.

I was not going name it after myself or take out a patent for it or anything like that, but I'd never heard it described in the literature … Of course, I know now that others have had the same idea... possibly it was the French who hit upon it first, though generously I believe they attribute it to the Italians. Anyway, it's been around for a while now. Even Catullus had something to say about it … though he wasn't exactly an evangelist for the practise...

But I digress.

So the physics master having somehow explained the state of play, when he found us; viz. my friend propped up against the boathouse wall – and in his defence, fully compliant with all uniform regs. from the waist up, though standards having slipped somewhat below– and your narrator, kneeling on the boathouse floor, with a pleasant-looking flush to his complexion, the headmaster asked me if I understood if I saw what was wrong about my actions.”

“And did you?” I say, rubbing my thumb in small circles against his shoulder.

“Of course. I told him it was a guaranteed way to put unwanted creases in ones trousers, which is always something to weigh carefully before embarking on any course of action.

At the time it was all pretty awful. My end of term reports had never been comforting reading for my father, 'though I always did pretty well in my exams. It was generally understood that while rather bright, I was sadly untrained.

I was always of the feeling that the training side of things was for the school to dish up. One doesn't want to step on any toes by turning up ready-trained. Think of those poor masters in the dole queue, if all were to adopt it as policy.

They took a different view, of course.

I left midway through the summer term and that autumn I was sent to Sedleigh. Which wasn't such a bad place and I met... well anyway. So you see, it all turned out for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

“The act in which you and the young gentleman were engaged...”

“Well.. with age and experience I now know I can not lay claim to it as inventor, but I rather like to think that through patient practise and diligent application I may have perfected it.”

“An uplifting moral for any young scholar, Mr Psmith”

“I like to think so, yes.”

“Then with the benefit of your experience, you must tell me how well I've mastered it.”

And so we cease talking for a while.

 

 


	4. Lyons Tearoom

“Hello, duckie,” says Doll, kissing me on each cheek in the Continental style, “To what do I owe the pleasure after bitter months of long neglect? You haven't come to see me since I was playing at the Palais. I forgive all of course... for you're looking rather radiant and I suspect a new beau, _n'est pas_?”

“Hello, Doll” I say.

It is Wednesday afternoon, my usual afternoon out as agreed under the terms of my employment. Mr Wooster will be at his club and I will not be expected home until late in the evening.

I have moved through the week up until now like a sleepwalker. Since our second meeting, I have thought of little other than seeing my new friend again. We are to meet in two days time, when Mr Wooster is due to participate in his club's annual darts tournament and so shall not be expected to return until late.

But while of course I would not break my engagement with Doll – which would be particularly ill-mannered having been the one to invite him here today – I find a part of me regrets that I will not be going to Bloomsbury this afternoon instead. The days are like a fog pressing in against me from every side.

I pull out Doll's chair for him and he sits down at the tea shop table. The lunch crowd having left, it is not busy. The weather has turned these last few days and although it is only four o'clock, the streets are damp and cold.

Steam is pressing up against the glass.

“Well sitteth yourself down, Reggie my love” he says to me, as I hesitate beside my own chair, “You make a girl feel nervous. Just watching you flutter so is giving me a case of the neurasthenia. How you do hover! You're like an undertaker in a sitting room – one should think there'd been a death in the family.”

Doll looks just as he always does; vulgar and splendid all at once. In his company I often feel like a school boy, like that shy fourteen-year-old serving behind the bar at the Hope and Anchor in the summers after I first went into service. He has plucked his eyebrows into a Marlene Dietrich arch, hennaed his hair and painted on a beauty spot. Doll is dressed half man/ half woman, in trousers, a peach silk blouse and a string of corral beads.

She is Queen of all Bitches and I think he is marvellous.

For all that my customary speech is informed by the art the elocution teacher, clipped and clear and purposeful, it is by force of will that I maintain the tone of a man who may move between classes at will. This is the nature of my profession and it suits me. Yet to my occasional chagrin, despite years of careful attention to and correction of my modes of speech, I find that when I am with Doll my accent tends to slip somewhat. Over the course of a conversation, my speech takes on inflections from south of the river, an atavistic part of me; a blend of cockney and docker talk, and sometimes even some of Doll's camp argot. Doll got me young.

My father's death had deracinated me; for the latter part of my childhood my mother, my sister and myself moved often between places, never staying long enough to settle. For a period of about three years we lived this way, passed from relation to relation until my mother's health also failed, and I went into service. During this nomadic era, I found I would take on whatever mode of speech was most usual to where we were living. I became an expert imitationist, and to this day I am not sure what my natural voice might sound like.

It is reasonable to say I came of age between Dulwich, Deptford and the army, but my normal speech carries so few traces of either.

My late father would be ashamed if he could hear my accent slipping, almost as ashamed as he might be to see me sharing tea and macaroons with someone like Doll in the first place.

Despite the sad and ignominious circumstances which surrounded his death, he had worked hard to get on in life. The primary stages of which, had been to assiduously scrub all regionalisms from his speech and accent. My mother had studied elocution while she was working behind the counter of a dressmaker's shop and spoke nicely, but in a rather hesitating manner. It was if the effort of remembering how to speak in the way of which my father approved, made her forget whatever it was she had been setting out to say.

Mr Wooster would be surprised, I think, to know any of this; for I am not sure he is aware that I could come from any place in particular. If pressed, he would most likely tell you that I come from the agency.

I strive always to reveal nothing of myself through accident of speech. Sometimes I have a certain nightmare, in which I am bringing Mr Wooster his breakfast or a telegram or some minor thing or other, when a huge oily black bubble forms deep in my guts and, slowly but irresistibly rises, comes spilling out of my mouth and onto my shirt front, revolting us both.

But Doll knows me well enough that there is nothing to reveal, and I am at ease with him.

Doll doesn't care in the slightest how he sounds to other people. One moment he will talk like a Duchess, the next moment like a costamonger. It's all the same to him. In the same spirit, he'll share his bed with a Duke or a barrow boy; Doll never needed Edward Carpenter to teach him that _eros_ was a leveller.

I wonder what he would make of my new friend's professed socialism; after all, he is a natural and instinctive socialist, generous to a fault, whether with his own or other people's money. He is also my oldest and most consistent friend. No-one knows more about me than Doll. I feel a sort of nervous, agitation that I should finally be able to tell another living person about the events of the last week. Yet now that Doll actually sits in front of me a sort of reluctance forms. It is like allowing light to fall upon a photographic plate; I fear that too much exposure may spoil the cherished image.

The waitress comes over to our table. It is _de facto_ a queer sort of place, for we flock here. No-one remembers quite how or why – most likely because of its proximity to well-known night spots – but a certain type of clientèle have long congregated to this particular Lyons tearoom. Because she has seen our type coming in here before – and regardless of what she might make of him – the waitress is not taken aback by my old friend's colourful mode of dress, as she takes our order.

“Three coconut macaroons for me,” says Doll, “And a pot of tea. My dear friend will have black coffee, and one of my coconut macaroons. She says she won't, but she will. And you, my dear, will be our witness when it happens, won't you, miss?”

“Yes, sir”, says the waitress, “If you say so. Four coconut macaroons, a pot of tea and a pot of coffee.”

“Three coconut macaroons” says Doll, “For she will not suffer to have one of her own for the sake of putting in peril her trim figure, yet she will stoop imperil her mortal soul by pinching mine, you see. And I should like two, for I am in dire need of sweetening.”

“Right away, gents” says the waitress and vanishes to the back of the café.

“Well, well” says Doll, fixing me with a knowing eye, “You never invite me out these days but to gloat, my love. So who is he?”

“Doll!” I say, “I don't know what you mean. How's Cyril?”

“He's a lamb and I am quite devoted. I really am. I am a loving, tender wifey; a Very Angel of the Hearth and in Queen's Gardens. But you are dodging and ducking most shamefully, Reggie. Dish it, or I shall speculate wildly and shalln't be held accountable. Now tell auntie, who is he?”

“He's nobody. Well alright... there might be someone.”

“So Patience has fallen off her Monument at last!”

The waitress returns with the tea and macaroons.

I drink the scalding coffee, which is weak and unpleasant but gives me something more to do with my hands than fidget like a school child.

Doll chats for a while, filling me in on the goings on in our old part of town. For although his days on their market stall are long past, he still goes home to tea with his mother and father every Sunday if he's not touring. In the customary way we pick over the local births, deaths and marriages and I find it all rather comforting. This is the life I could have had, had I stayed working for my aunt in the Crown and Anchor. It would not even have been a bad one.

At very least, there would have been no cow creamers to contend with.

He tells me about the revue in which he is currently performing and about an upcoming booking for a pantomime in at Wigan Hippodrome all through December. Doll is a talented female impersonator and unlike many of his fellow drag artistes, has a good deal of musicality. While not the most technical of performers, he has a fine voice and great deal of presence on the stage.

Indeed, his turn as Fairy Godmother to Cinderella last year had a surprising gravitas, which must be seen to be quite understood.

Cyril too is discussed at greater length, Doll's latest 'husband' – a police sergeant from South Norwood, who adores Doll and would fight the world on his behalf, if only the world didn't have a habit of backing down with its hands in the air when confronted with Doll for any length of time.

After twenty minutes or so I do take one of Doll's macaroons, although I do not usually like them. I dip it in my cooling coffee and let it crumble.

“There now,” says Doll triumphantly, “I have both given of the daily bread and delivered you from evil, for that one was yours all along. I am quite Madame Clairvoyant, or at least I would be were it not for the fact you do it every time...”

“Alright Doll,” I say, at last, “I'll spill”

And so I tell him all about meeting the young man in Bloomsbury, and how I will seeing him again the day after tomorrow.

“He sounds like your cast-iron ideal, darling” says Doll, at length, “Young, gangling and pale; giving little evidence of that he spinneth much, and that he toileth, none at all. Now do remind me, for I am a dizzy old bitch and my memory is prone to lapses, but your pal Herr Cigs-and-Fried-Egg did say something or other about the … now let me get this right … I'll clear my throat a little first ...the _Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie_. I've not read it myself, as I've an allergy to the Krauten-sprachen and truthfully prefer something in the line of Rosie M Bank's latest to pass an a idle hour. But I do believe you have summarised it for me before – for some of it was rather mucky – and a certain insight doth spring to mind in your case...”

I give Doll a warning look across the table, for we have spoken on the subject on which he is about to embark on previous occasions and I would prefer not to speak of it again, not least in a public venue.

Doll meets my look with steel eyes; warning Doll towards discretion is like warning an engine at full steam that it should tiptoe.

“Now dearie,” says Doll, who does lower his voice a fraction out of friendship, “I do not suggest that you yourself have _all_ the very hands and lungens arrayed within – for after all you're not a pork butcher on a market day – only … mightn’t one be tempted to suggest someone is suffering from a bijou little _fixation_?”

“If you mean, 'does he remind me of my employer, Mr Wooster?', then yes I suppose so,” I say in a clipped sort of whisper, for of course the connection had occurred to me even before Doll had brought it up.

“Up to a point. I'll own that they are of a similar physiognomical type, though Mr Wooster is fair-haired and perhaps not quite so tall. And yes, they share a class background. But I am certain the similarities end there. In any case, Doll, by no means do I subscribe fully to all of Mr Freud's theories on these matters.”

“Well it's alright to have a type, I suppose” says Doll, sitting back in his chair and looking at me a little sadly, “Only I've always said, you'd make some lucky bitch a fine specimen of a husband, if only you didn't spend so much time in playing devoted wife to that silly boy-king of yours.”

“I have to make my living, Doll,” I say, firmly.

“But you don't have to make it there... you could find another position. You practically have to bat the offers from your door, but bat them you do. And incidentally I don't just mean from other guv'nors... for I've been out and about with you, and witnessed you bat offers that this old quean would most surely bowl for... even if I am a married lady now.”

“I like Mr Wooster,” I say, and Doll clucks, “He needs someone to look after him. His aunt has just this week enlisted him in some new felonious undertaking... I'd tell you all about it, but you're wedded to the law these days. Although, regarding that I may need to call upon your Cyril for a small favour, when the time comes. I'll let you know nearer the occasion.”

“Well if you do, I shall tell Cyril that he will be happy to oblige,” says Doll, “But you see; your Mr Wooster gives you only trouble! I ought to have my Cyril come round and arrest the lot of them... some of your stories are like the middle part of a Sunday-school tract.”

“He's a victim of his own kindness, but that's what makes him such a pleasant man to work for. We are very comfortable together.”

“Oh yes, yes, I do know. 'Exceedingly amiable, mentally negligible'... which of course, duckie, he would have to be for not catching the drift of all your lingering looks and subtle smoulderings … that's rather good stuff isn't it? Do you not think I could rolling in clover, living the life of luxury of a lady novelist a la Mademoiselles Banks and Morehead, if only my handwriting were better or I'd ever learnt to type?”

“I can assure you that, do not cast 'lingering looks' at him, Doll.”

“Oh but vada you subtly smoulder!”

“It is irreverent.”

“I'm only being wicked, Reggie. You know me, no more etiquette than if I'd been dragged up in a gutter... and my old mother always doing her best by me. It's fit to make you sick, my love. This new young man of yours sounds like quite the hot prospect. I worry, that's all, I only want to see you happy.”

“Well not everyone can be happy, Doll, especially not if you're queer.”

“Reg, that's a shocking thing to say! In any case, as long as I'm queer I'm also gay! You ought to think about that sometime. Cyril's like you... ever so respectable, Constable Lily Law of the Charpering Squad, but we're happy together. We make each other happy. That's what matters.”

I have nothing to say to that, for Doll has always lived by a different philosophy. Where I am inclined to Stoicism, Doll is natively Epicurean. I envy him, but that cannot alter my fundamental character.

Doll looks at me and pauses. I can see he is weighing up whether or not to say next whatever it is that is on his mind. This is so unlike Doll, that I feel an almost irrational apprehension about what it is he has to say next.

“Listen Reggie and I am serious for a moment... yes, even I can be serious. This young man of yours, are you quite sure he's all kosher? You never fall this fast. In fact, I've never seen you fall at all... in all your past affairs you've only sort of... stumbled for a moment, caught your breath and walked on. I don't know him and I know everyone... and from what you've said he's not the type to shrink beneath the beady eye. Now I know you're the soul of discretion and that compared to you the silence of the tomb is like a mothers' meeting, but be careful!”

“Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.”

“Something like that,” he said, swirling the dregs of tea leaves in the bottom of his cup, “Now shall I read your tea-leaves?”

“My aunt used to do that,” I say, “Not Aunt Vera at the Anchor, she's never been metaphysically inclined. My Aunt Annie in Clapham.”

“Well, let your Auntie Doll try her hand at it.”

He tips the leaves out onto his saucer.

“Well now,” he says, passing it to me, “What do you think all that means, then?”

But all I could see was a dark, wet sludge on white china.

~*~

“Comrade,” says Psmith, kissing me lightly on the mouth, before striking me on the shoulder in mock indignation, “You must answer for yourself and spare no mitigating circumstance; no details, however trifling they may at first appear.”

“Regarding what, may I ask?”

“Regarding this: For your sake, and your sake alone, I sat as Patience on her Monument, through one hour and a half of solid lecture on the subject Roman Funerary Sculpture... of which, as we have touched upon the subject just recently, I shall tell you the monuments were multitudinous and in massed ranks, required much patience to endure. And I can assure you – in case you were feeling reticent – that the esteemed gentleman who was heading up the binge, was also not one to spare the details, however trifling they may have at first appeared...”

Then in a performance that would make Doll spit in envy, he shakes his head sadly and casts down his eyes, like one whose secret sorrow can not be spoken.

“I'm not sure if I am quite able to forgive you yet, comrade” he says like Hamlet to a skull, then brightening visibly once more continues, “The only sliver of silver to line that particular cloud, was the opportunity to converse with our mutual friend Comrade Jenkins. I rather think he grows fond of me – as a brother-scholar I mean... not your love-rival. For I should not like to think of the two of you duelling for my hand in Russell Square.”

“I'm sorry,” I say, stifling my laughter, “But, in mitigation, I was unaware I was ever due to attend the lecture in question.”

“Well, I had rather deduced I might spot you there,” he says, reaching for my hand and squeezing it briefly before letting it drop, “But you see, you foiled my deductions quite cleverly, by simply not attending. Cunning I admit, but this subterfuge grows wearisome. I have notes and observations upon which I should like to consult with you, in between our little tete-a-tetes. Only, it's been a month now and I still have no means of tracing you. It's as if Holmes only ever got to speak with Watson on Sundays and Bank Holidays.”

“You leave letters for me at my club,” I say, for the Junior Ganymede serves as my principal correspondence address, this facility being one of the principle reasons that the club was founded. However much I enjoy living with my present employer, it is exceedingly difficult to manage without an address of one's own.

“True, comrade, but you only seem to collect them every other day. Also, I've looked up the Junior Ganymede in Whitten's Directory and there is no mention of its existence, it is some sort of Freemason thing? A esoteric sect? Is Comrade Jenkins a member? Enquiring minds must know.”

It is true that a month has passed since our first meeting in the British Museum.

During this month, I have seen him at every opportunity. The Bassett-Spode wedding even allowed us the opportunity to spend an entire night together, for my master had elected to travel there sans valet and stay over night in lodgings nearby, before returning the next day.

Fortunately the past few weeks have afforded Mr Wooster few opportunities for cataclysm or calamity. Indeed, it had been the most placid era to date in my employment with him, for while there was the small incident of a night-time heist involving a certain silver cow creamer, the burglary was effected with minimal difficulty.

The circumstances by which Mr Wooster was required to commit this act of theft are too tedious to relate at length here. To put it briefly, Mr Wooster's aunt, Mrs Dahlia Travers, had supposed in error that a cow creamer belonging to Lord Sidcup, was in fact a cow creamer belonging to her husband, Mr Thomas Travers. In this belief and quite unknown to either Lord Sidcup or her husband, she had expropriated the cow creamer from the Earl's possession. Ignorant of its provenance, the cow creamer was subsequently sent by Mr Travers as a wedding present to Miss Bassett, the fiancée of Lord Sidcup.

Mrs Travers had enlisted Mr Wooster's assistance in extracting the cow creamer from Miss Bassett's ownership before the wedding, where it would be seen by Lord Sidcup thus giving the game away, as I believe they say in the movies where these things are apt to occur.

Mr Wooster agreed, out of his habitual kindness, to lend his assistance in the role of gentleman thief and so was plunged once more into acts of felony.

On the day set aside for the burglary, we had set out in the two-seater to Totleigh-under-Wold under the pretext of attending a local race-meeting, which I felt would serve as an adequate alibi were questions to be asked subsequently.

The meeting happened to prove rather personally advantageous and after a pleasant afternoon, followed by an evening's dining in a local hostelry, we had driven from the village by cover of darkness. Around midnight, my young master had crept into Miss Bassett's morning room, in which the wedding presents were laid out, and had extracted the cow creamer from the spot where the parlour maid (who was working as double-agent under orders from Mr Wooster's aunt) had placed it.

As had been arranged in advance, the French doors were left unlocked and it had been the work of an instant for Mr Wooster to appropriate the cow creamer and conceal it about his person. Then he had simply to cross the gardens, hop back into the waiting vehicle, which was idling at the end of the long drive, and effect his escape.

I played the role of 'get-away' driver and we returned to London post-haste.

I had convinced Mr Wooster's aunt that it would be inadvisable to put the ornament into hock, as she had initially suggested.

While a certain leniency may be extended in matters of these friendly, family larcenies, passing stolen goods is quite another matter and is likely to be looked upon by the authorities with rather less indulgence than Mrs Travers may have come to expect through her previous dealings with magistrates, which had been strictly social in character.

Her plan, while in other respects sound, had its fatal weakness when it came to returning the cow creamer to Lord Sidcup. Mrs Travers had originally suggested that the item should be put into pawn, and then when the pledge had been allowed to expire unredeemed, she should chance upon it in the pawn broker's window and return it to Lord Sidcup herself.

She had reasoned, quite correctly, that Lady Sidcup being entirely unschooled in antique silver-ware, would not be able to positively identify the cow creamer as the one stolen from amongst the wedding gifts. Lord Sidcup, however, would be quite readily able to identify the cow creamer that had been stolen (by Mrs Travers) some time previously. As Lord Sidcup would not have seen the presents in advance of the wedding, due to his expressed intention to devote himself to his political work in anticipation of his absence for honeymoon, he would not know that both of the stolen cow creamers were one and the same. The restitution of his own cow creamer would go some way to mitigating the loss of the cow creamer that had been given to the newly-weds by the Travers family.

With this in mind, I convinced her amend the plan to allow Doll's policeman husband Cyril – after a report of its theft had been filed and circulated and an appropriate period of time had passed – to return the cow creamer to its rightful owner.

This served its purpose two fold; it would do Cyril's standing a bit of good among the ranks constabulary – for Lord Sidcup was a powerful man and his influence considerable amongst the police force, and would do away with uncontrollable variables, while directing the burden of suspicion far away from Mr Wooster and his aunt. Cyril returning the cow creamer in his capacity as officer of the law, would lend legitimacy to the case that a gang of specialist thieves must have been at work in its theft. Without his involvement there had been aspects of the story that risked beggaring credulity, even of such a man as Lord Sidcup.

Mrs Travers readily agreed with my proposal and Doll was quick to persuade Cyril that he had only to gain through his participation in the scheme.

In the mean time, Doll was using the cow creamer as a part of his own tea service. It stands pride of place in his parlour and I believe he has taken quite a fancy to it

On previous occasions, Mr Wooster's wild forays into the ranks of the criminal classes have never been without complications. But while he had seemed rather pale and shaken as he sat beside me on the journey back to London, it appeared that the plan had gone off without a hitch. Not only was he in possession of a cow creamer, his aunt had confirmed subsequently that it was even the correct cow creamer.

It would appear that having accrued much practise in these matters in recent years, my young master's skills as master-criminal have undergone considerable improvement.

The object was not noticed to be missing until after the wedding had taken place. Given the high profile nature of the owners, the theft was reported in the papers but the police found no leads and so the matter rests to date.

Miss Bassett was married a few days after the escapade. All that remains is for Cyril to complete his part in the plan, which he shall do as soon as the new Lord and Lady Sidcup return from their honeymoon on the Continent.

Now that Miss Bassett has safely become Lady Sidcup, Mr Wooster's disposition seems to have lightened considerably.

I gather Psmith into my arms and kiss him. He puts up no resistance, indeed he drags us down onto the chaise where we remain pleasantly occupied and entangled until he draws back and says sternly;

“I say, comrade. Your counter-strategy is a subtle one, yet repel it I must.”

Disentangling himself, Psmith stands.

“Now we have established early in our acquaintance that you are not a school master,” he says to me, in the manner of a barrister for the prosecution, “I will not suggest that you are a bank manager, for I myself was once in that trade. While you are more than capable of oiling the wheels of commerce, if you were in that line – given your natural ability – by now you should either be a New York millionaire or stationed in some overseas office, fanned by willing legions of young Burmese boys and sipping cool drinks on hot verandas. Time and location prove otherwise. My latest theory is as follows. You are a secret agent; the head of overseas espionage for the Independent African Republic of Ishmaelia.”

“Am I not rather light-complexioned for that role?” I ask, but Psmith shakes his head.

“Not at all, not at all. For you should make a poor spy-chief if you were conspicuous in the position. Of course, you provide counter-espionage for the British government, or I should have to have to turn you in for treachery. In my youth I was an avid subscriber to the The Boys' Own Paper, so I know the protocol where these things are concerned. Case for the prosecution: you are an astute, urbane, dark-eyed man of a powerful build and indeterminate years. You reveal nothing, yet you seem to know everything and everyone. I am not allowed to know where you live, nor indeed your real name... for I believe I myself suggested Comrade Brown as an alias to you, when you were set on pinching my one. Unless by lucky coincidence I happen to have a natural aptitude as census taker and guessed it right first time, you could well be a Jones or a Wimpole or a Blendergast or something.”

“I'm sorry, Psmith” I say, “It really is impossible.”

“Reggie,” he says, sitting back down beside me and I am taken aback, for he so seldom uses my Christian name, “I try to understand, what can I say to you to … oh dash it! Do you know, Comrade Brown (if that is your real name), that for the first time in my quarter century or so I am actually at a loss for what I should say?”

I too am at a loss, but our time together is already so rationed that I do not want to spend the time in quarrelling.

The truth of the matter is that I still fear the risk of exposure; blackmail or worse. I fear not only for myself, but for how the scandal might reflect upon my employer whose bachelor habits may be open to scrutiny were I to be exposed.

“Let's go to dinner tonight,” I say, for the flat has suddenly become oppressive in atmosphere and I want nothing better than to be away from it.

“Alright. We shall dine out. Allow me to dress first... I look rather Bohemian even for Bloomsbury Square.”

I follow him in the bedroom, where I sit at the end of the over-sized bed and watch while he changes.

I rise to help him put on his tie and as I do, he kisses me; I wrap my arms around him, draw him close. My heart feels bloated and heavy and I wish it would simply burst, for I feel that I can bear it no longer.

We walk out into the street together, arm in arm. A thin mist of drizzle hangs in the air. I take him to a little bistro that I am familiar with not far from his flat. We step in from the cold, to the smell of garlic and tomato and inexpensive wine. Psmith sniffs the air rather dubiously, but allows the waiter to take his coat.

We take a table in the far corner and I exchange a few words with the chef, who is an old acquaintance of mine.

Under cover of white-and-red checked cloth, we keep our legs tangled underneath the table throughout the meal.

“So tell me about your wife,” says Psmith when the plates have been cleared away, looking me straight in the eye, with one brow raised.

“I am unmarried,” I say and he kicks me sharply in the shin.

“Ow!” I exclaim and draw back my legs.

“Then why not let me send so much as a postcard! I begin to suspect I was correct all along, you are a double-agent. I know you are not immune to me, comrade, I am not racked with self-doubt, tearing apart the innocent daisies in 'he loves me, he loves me not'. You are fond of me. So why the Scarlett Pimpernel act?”

“Psmith,” I say, “Apart from a few anecdotes, you have been almost as opaque in the details of your own life, as I am in mine.”

He thinks for a moment, swirling the wine around in his glass meditatively.

“Alright then, we shall play tit for tat. Me first, I am an orphan.”

“I'm sorry,” I say gently, resting my calf against his again beneath the table, “My parents too, are now deceased. My father passed away when I was eight, my mother some years later. I have a married sister, who lives in Nunhead.”

“My father died last year” says Psmith, his face a mask of composure, “It was quite sudden and he left debts. I had been... well I had been always rather wealthy until then, now I have a small income of my own but it's not much to live on. My mother died before I ever really knew her. My older sister died of measles my first term away at school. No brothers or sisters living. Do you honestly not have a wife?”

“Yes. I always knew I wouldn't marry,” I say, quietly but steadily, “I first started to experiment in that regard with other young persons of my own sex during adolescence. I had several encounters while in the army and by the time I was living in the London at the end of the war, I had become quite active.”

I take a deep breath and decide to continue.

“That is, until I was arrested for gross indecency and threatened with a prison sentence,” Psmith looks at me in sympathy, but I shake my head, “The judge displayed leniency on grounds of my age, military record and previous good character, but the shame... it was the shame of it, that ate away at me for years after. I'd never felt any sort of shame before. Now I do. I try not to, but I do.”

“I have a fiancée,” says Psmith and my eyes widen with surprise, for somehow even the thought had never so much as occurred to me.

Seeing my reaction, he laughs.

“You needn't look so very surprised” he says, “Some people think I'm rather good-looking.”

“Where is the young lady?” I ask, for I am not sure what else to say to this revelation, “Surely not in London?”

“In Italy,” he answer, “Cataloguing the mouldering library of some old Dodge or other. That's the trouble with the cataloguing business; you do one and word gets out. We were brought together while she was cataloguing one place, now we are separated by her cataloguing of another.”

“And you fell in love with her?”

“I fell in love with her hat, then the rest of her sort of followed. She's a real sport and I like her a lot. She's the best friend of the wife of my best friend. So there's a sort of symmetry to it all.”

“And you plan to wed the young lady?”

“Well, that's what tends to follow this whole becoming engaged to be married business, yes.”

“Marriage is a noble estate.”

“Don't you start. I feel rotten about it the whole thing. Like I say, I have a small income which may just about stretch to keeping me in spats and shoe leather, but won't rightfully cover a lady's hat allowance in addition to the aforementioned. Also, noble though the estate my be, I'm not sure that I am rightfully in line for it...”

“My own suspicions had been forming in regards to that point, Psmith,” I say, pressing his leg with my own. He smiles, rather wryly and presses back.

"Well some people go in for both! I'm not sure which way I am myself; she really is ever such a great kid, but I'm not sure if the way I feel about her is the proper thing exactly. I like getting her letters, but I don't miss her. Now, I really _was_ in love with someone once; still love him actually. We even lived together for a while... then he broke it all off and got married. Now I can't help but wonder if he was one of the ones who went in for both... or if he only ever went to bed with me as a sort of lark, or even worse a sort of favour. I think I only proposed to Eve because... well actually let's drop it. I'm due to ask you a question. What do you do for a living anyway?”

“I work in a personal capacity for a young gentleman of means.”

“Like a confidential secretary? I was one of those for a while, after leaving the fish biz.”

“The fish business?”

“Oh yes, I was very nearly a high-vizier of haddock, a mackerel mogul, a sultan of sprats. After my father died, I got shoved into my uncle's fish biz. down Billingsgate. But I couldn't stick it, so I quit and went freelance. I quit the confidential secretary biz. too pretty sharpish … as it turns out I'm not particularly confidential. We left it on good terms, however. I have a sneaking suspicion it was my old guv'nor who paid my dues for the Senior Cons Club this year... I shouldn't have been able to afford it myself, but when I went to the Club Secretary about it he said I was all paid up.”

“So what do you do now?”

A look of pain crossed Psmith's face.

“Now that, comrade, is a matter of some delicacy. I am in the publishing industry.”

I try to suppress it, but my mind turns inescapably back towards the concept of blackmail.

“What exactly is it you publish, Mr Psmith?” I ask, carefully.

“Have you ever spent time in New York, Comrade Brown?” he asks unexpectedly.

“Strangely enough I have.”

“And during you time in New York, have you had the misfortune – and it's dashed bad luck for you if this is so – but have you ever encountered a certain weekly periodical by the name of 'Cosy Moments'?”

I have to think for a moment, for the name, surprisingly enough, is familiar to me from somewhere.

Then I remember the episode of Mr Rockmeteller Todd, the American poet and admirer of Whitman, whose aunt my employer had once invited to stay for a period of time as a guest in his New York apartment. The aunt had wanted to experience the city's night life. Mr Wooster's offer was extended in the spirit of friendship towards Mr Todd, of whom he remains fond.

The visit was a memorable one and seemed set to continue for quite some time longer, until the lady in question happened to attend a revivalist meeting of the Rev. Jimmy Mundy's at Madison Square Gardens. The sermon was persuasive. Having decided that Manhattan Island bore too close a resemblance to the Cities of the Plains to remain stationed there with clarity of conscience, Mr Todd's aunt departed immediately, lest she run the risk of being turned into a pillar of salt on the way back to Illinois.

It was while arranging the guest room after her departure, I had chanced upon a copy of the publication Psmith had just mentioned, which I believe she must have left out while packing.

It had stuck in the mind principally for the intolerable nature of the dross contained within.

A sort of milky nursery pudding of a publication targeted to the most asinine of readerships. I though it must do rather well.

I relate the story to Psmith and he claps his hands together.

“How whole heartedly I agree! And I should know, for you are dining with proprietor.”

He explains at some length how he came to own the small paper while still a student at Cambridge. The paper, under the management of a diligent editor, remains acceptably profitable. Between this and a small income from his late mother's estate, Mr Psmith maintains a tolerable lifestyle. I do not ask him what he plans to do with his life beyond this, for I should not like to put him in the position of being unable to answer. A Psmith lost for words, is not quite Psmith.

After I settle the bill we walk out into the gloomy street. It is late and I have to return to Mr Wooster's apartment.

As we are about to part ways, Psmith grabs my hand. The street is empty, but I spring back from the streetlight, so we are standing in the dark space between the lampposts, his hand clasping mine. My heart beats very quickly, for the constant fear for exposure which is mixed up with desire.

“If it should not have been for that fog,” he says intently, rather breathless, “And if I had not happened to be living on Lambs Conduit Street, and if you should not have happened to direct us there like a knight of old... where... where could we have gone?”

“What do you mean?” I say, close in his ear, so my lips are almost brushing against the soft part of it as I speak.

“Where could we have gone our first meeting? Together? Where do you go since you can't go home with a chap?”

“There are places in the parks” I say slowly, my heart running quicker than my words, “Away from the paths. Sometimes you see the park-keeper's torch swinging the dark and you stop for a moment, hold your breath, neither one of you breathing, feeling as if the heat of two bodies close together is radiating, like a flare, but then it's dark again and so you carry on. There are lavatories, without attendants. There are railway arches. There are alleyways between buildings.”

“Well, comrade,” he says, his breath a white spectre in the cold night air, “You can't come home with me. There is a plague upon my house, it brims with locusts, frogs and fiancées. I can't come home with you; the Ishmaeli army would have you shot for fraternising. Tell me the comparative merits of this alley I see before us?”

“It's quiet, it's empty, it's dark. But principally, it's very close.”

Hand in hand, we slip between the buildings. The night warms between us.


End file.
